Stupid Ideas I Haven't Done: Eye Surgery

Like everyone, I tend to come up with a lot of ideas that I never get around to doing. Sometimes, it’s because they’re pretty stupid ideas. So, in order to do something with them, I’m throwing them out here. If anyone wants to make these stupid ideas a reality, go for it!

Stupid Idea: I remember reading in a fifth-grade type Health textbook that nearsightedness is caused by the eye muscles and/or optic nerve pulling too hard on the eyeball itself, stretching it out to be long and skinny. (Likewise, farsightedness is caused by the muscles and/or nerve pushing too hard on it, squashing it.) I don’t know if this is true or not — the same text had the whole thing about the regions of the tastebuds, which isn’t true at all. But I always figured it was true, and as a person who is totally completely nearsighted, I thought, “Hey, what if there was a way to introduce slack into the muscles and/or nerve, so the eyeball could relax and go back to its normal shape, and I could actually friggin’ see?”

I thought about whether or not it’d be possible to do that — cut open a flap on the side of the head so you could get in there, and either trim the muscle a little bit to make it a little less taut, or even better, sever it and put in some extra muscle to make it longer. And maybe doing that to the optic nerve as well. After all, dead people got eyes they ain’t usin’. So why not use that to help out people like me who are tryin’ to use their eyes with what they’ve got, huh? Maybe that’d work better than using lasers to change the shape of the retinal wall or the eye-cup thingy on the back of the eye or whatever it is they do.

Why I Never Did It: I do not have a degree in any medical field let alone opthamalic surgery. I don’t know if this would work, and I apparently cannot even be arsed to look up whether or not my ideas gleaned from a half-remembered textbook I read when I was ten are even remotely correct. Also, no willing subjects to try this on.